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‘Mad Men’ Fifth Season? Follow the Money

“Mad Men,” the three-time Emmy Award-winning AMC series, might not return until later in 2011 or possibly 2012.Credit
Michael Yarish/AMC

Fans accustomed to spending their summer Sundays with Don Draper may have to wait a while longer. It looks increasingly likely that the fifth season of “Mad Men,” the three-time Emmy Award-winning AMC series, will not have its debut until late 2011 or early 2012.

Production would normally start around this time for the next season of “Mad Men,” but AMC has not announced a new deal with the studio that makes the show, Lionsgate, nor has that studio announced a new deal with Matthew Weiner, the series’s acclaimed creator.

Mr. Weiner has said he wants the show to continue, and AMC has pledged that it will definitely return, so the delay is largely due to a disagreement about money. As Mr. Weiner told Entertainment Weekly in January, apparently referring to AMC and Lionsgate, “They are fighting over a very lucrative property, and who is going to pay for it to get made; it’s one of the biggest perils of success — everyone wants a piece of it now, and they are fighting over who is gonna get the biggest chunk.”

Money often causes strife between program creators and distributors, but rarely do the negotiations drag out this long.

People involved in the talks suggested this week that one or both deals may be imminent, but that may not be enough to ensure a summer start. Todd Gold, the editor in chief of XfinityTV.com, Comcast’s television news site, said it was becoming clear that the show was “right on the cusp of going one way or the other.”

“By now, the writing staff should be humming along, maybe about a month or more into work for a summer premiere,” he said. “Unless Weiner is secretly manufacturing outlines in preparation of some crazy all-night writing sessions with his staff, it might be time for fans to grow concerned.”

“Mad Men” has always enjoyed an extraordinarily passionate fan base. Last month the sisters Deborah and Roberta Lipp, the makers of a fan Web site for “Mad Men” called Basket of Kisses, promoted a petition calling on AMC and Lionsgate to bring the show back in 2011. But now they are mostly resigned to a 2012 return date.

Roberta Lipp added: “The most highly acclaimed show on television and it can’t get back on the air? Unacceptable.”

One question has continued to hover over the negotiations: How many more seasons of “Mad Men” should there be? It is understood that AMC has the rights to “Mad Men” through Season 5 but that it wants to renew the show through at least Season 6, with Mr. Weiner on board. Mr. Weiner, whose contract ended after Season 4, has never definitively answered the how-many-seasons question. He did not respond to a request for an interview this week, but he told Entertainment Weekly in January that “I want the show to go on and on and on until it has worn out its welcome with viewers, and we can’t think of anything more for the characters to do.”

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“Mad Men” was held up by negotiations once before, after the second season in October 2008. At the time Variety called it “one of the most protracted negotiations in memory,” and then it was settled by the following January.

The current negotiations started last summer before Season 4 even had its premiere, and they have extended into the spring. AMC retained Jim Jackoway, an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, to represent it; he confirmed this week that he remained in AMC’s employ regarding “Mad Men” but could not comment further.

In the meantime “Mad Men” actors like John Slattery, who plays Roger Sterling, are in a bind, expecting that they will be called back to work but unsure when that call will come. While walking the red carpet at a premiere of his new film, “The Adjustment Bureau,” last month, Mr. Slattery remarked to reporters, “I’m looking for a job.”

Mr. Slattery has said in other interviews that Lionsgate has green-lighted the contracts of the “Mad Men” cast for another season. But first scripts need to be written, and there is no indication that writing is under way.

AMC and Lionsgate each declined to answer specific questions about the situation. “Can’t really comment right now,” Kevin Beggs, Lionsgate’s president for television programming and production, said in an e-mail on Monday.

AMC pays more than $2 million per episode for “Mad Men” now, and Lionsgate surely wants a higher fee, since “Mad Men” almost single-handedly built AMC into a home for quality cable dramas, allowing it to command higher subscriber fees from cable and satellite companies.

But AMC is not dependent on “Mad Men” the way it was two years ago, the last time the contracts were renegotiated. It has “Breaking Bad,” another acclaimed drama, coming back this summer, and “The Walking Dead,” which drew more than twice as many viewers as “Mad Men” when it made its debut last fall. The channel held a premiere screening in Los Angeles on Monday for another new drama, “The Killing,” which will start on April 3.

AMC may not have room on its schedule for “Mad Men” until the end of 2011 or early 2012, given that it currently schedules original shows only on Sunday nights. It would seem that the only option for fans until then is to rewatch the fourth season on DVD. It happens to come out next week.

A version of this article appears in print on March 23, 2011, on Page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: Season 5 for ‘Mad Men’? Follow the Money. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe